One out of every three women will be a victim of violence in her lifetime.

In some parts of the world a girl is more likely to be raped than to learn how to read.

Murder is a leading cause of death for pregnant women.

The children most at risk of attempted abduction by strangers are girls ages 10 to 14.

Every year, 60 million girls are sexually assaulted at or on their way to school.

Every 2 minutes, someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted.

97% of rapists will never spend a day in jail.

Femicide is the leading cause of on-the-job death for women.

Only about one third of countries around the world have laws in place to combat violence against women, and in most of these countries those laws are not enforced.

Women and girls ages 15 to 44 are more likely to be maimed or killed by men than by malaria, cancer, war or traffic accidents combined.

In Asia and South Asia, in addition to sex-selective abortions, millions of girls and women are killed after birth through starvation and violence, forced abortions, ‘honor’ killings, dowry murders, and witch lynchings.

And the reward: Women work 67% of the world’s working hours, yet earn only 10% of the world’s income.

Just since April, six states — Indiana, Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Oklahoma and Kansas — have enacted laws banning insurance coverage of abortion in the health insurance exchanges created as part of federal health care reform, bringing the total to 14 states. Two states — Arizona and Texas — joined three others in making ultrasounds mandatory for women seeking to terminate pregnancies. Bills expected to be signed soon by Florida’s Republican governor, Rick Scott, contain both types of provisions.

Many of these fresh attacks on reproductive rights, not surprisingly, have come in states where the midterm elections left Republicans in charge of both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s mansion.

The shameless attack on women’s rights is an inevitable consequence of the GOP’s electoral victories:

Using small-government, libertarian rhetoric, the Tea Party ushered in a new crop of Republican leaders under the banner of fiscal responsibility. But the aggressive antichoice legislation coming from the new GOP majority in the House makes perfectly clear that belt-tightening deficit reduction is entirely compatible with an older social agenda committed to pushing American women out of the public sphere.

These initiatives are well coordinated and poised to make an enormous impact on women’s lives. House Republicans, joined by ten Democrats, passed Mike Pence’s bill to eliminate federal funding for Planned Parenthood, which in addition to pregnancy termination provides basic reproductive healthcare, STD testing, birth control and cancer screenings to millions of American women. The Republican Party has also proposed eliminating more than $1 billion from Head Start’s budget. As a result, 157,000 children may go without preschool care.

Meanwhile, the South Dakota legislature has considered a bill justifying homicide in the case of imminent harm to a fetus, a law that critics believe may in effect legalize the murder of abortion providers. Republicans in Arizona have proposed different birth certificates for children born to women who are not US citizens in order to nullify the birthright citizenship established by the Fourteenth Amendment. And Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is poised to eliminate most of the collective bargaining rights of public employees, including nurses, teachers and other pink-collar workers who are disproportionately women.

It’s almost an unbe­liev­able fig­ure — 916. That’s the amount of leg­is­la­tion that has been intro­duced so far this year, in an attempt to reg­u­late a woman’s repro­duc­tive sys­tem, and we’re only in April.

This infor­ma­tion comes from a report byThe Guttmacher Insti­tute, and it finds that 49 states have con­tributed to this num­ber with var­i­ous bills geared towards reg­u­lat­ing Abor­tions and a woman’s right to choose. The report states that in 15 states, the fol­low­ing mea­sures became law:

expand the pre-abortion wait­ing period require­ment in South Dakota to make it more oner­ous than that in any other state, by extend­ing the time from 24 hours to 72 hours and requir­ing women to obtain coun­sel­ing from a cri­sis preg­nancy cen­ter in the interim;

expand the abor­tion coun­sel­ing require­ment in South Dakota to man­date that coun­sel­ing be pro­vided in-person by the physi­cian who will per­form the abor­tion and that coun­sel­ing include infor­ma­tion pub­lished after 1972 on all the risk fac­tors related to abor­tion com­pli­ca­tions, even if the data are sci­en­tif­i­cally flawed;

require the health depart­ments in Utah and Vir­ginia to develop new reg­u­la­tions gov­ern­ing abor­tion clinics;

revise the Utah abor­tion refusal clause to allow any hos­pi­tal employee to refuse to “par­tic­i­pate in any way” in an abortion;

limit abor­tion cov­er­age in all pri­vate health plans in Utah, includ­ing plans that will be offered in the state’s health exchange; and

revise the Mis­sis­sippi sex edu­ca­tion law to require all school dis­tricts to pro­vide abstinence-only sex edu­ca­tion while per­mit­ting dis­cus­sion of con­tra­cep­tion only with prior approval from the state.

The contrast between events in the Middle East and the political reality here in America is striking: as the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and elsewhere rise by the millions to protest injustice, and as governments from Jordan to Syria see the writing on the wall, the United States gives power to a political movement bent on reversing generations of progress.

Targeting scientists, academics, public broadcasters, unions, health care providers and women, among others, they willfully misinterpret the Constitution to make specious arguments in favor of reactionary policies and are whipped into a frenzy by millionaire radio and TV blatherers, whose sole mission is to demonize liberals and liberalism — to the point of inciting violence against them.

Democratic leaders, obsessed with wooing “independent” voters, and captives of a toxic Beltway mindset, barely make a stand in the face of this all-out assault.

If we fail to see the irony of a Mideast marching into the future while America races into the past, we will pay the price.

UPDATE: The GOP’s mission to deny women’s reproductive rights/freedom is exemplified by this:

One hundred members of Congress (so far) have cosponsored a bill introduced by far right Congressman Joe Pitts (R-PA) called the “Protect Life Act.” They want to “protect life” so much that they have written into the bill a new amendment that would override the requirement that emergency room doctors save every patient, regardless of status or ability to pay. The law would carve out an exception for pregnant women; doctors and hospitals will be allowed to let pregnant women die if interventions to save them will kill the fetus.

Georgia State Rep. Bobby Franklin has introduced a 10-page bill that would criminalize some miscarriages, and make abortion in Georgia completely illegal and punishable by death. Basically, it’s everything an “pro-life” activist could want aside from making all women who’ve had abortions wear big red “A”s on their chests.

For nearly a year, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, Virginia’s crusading Republican attorney general, has waged a one-man war on the theory of man-made global warming. Invoking his subpoena powers, he has sought to force the University of Virginia to turn over the files of a prominent climatology professor, asserting that his research may be marred by fraud. The university is battling the move in the courts. Now his allegations of manipulated data and scientific fraud are resonating in Congress, where Republican leaders face an influx of new members, many of them Tea Party stalwarts like Mr. Cuccinelli, eager to inveigh against the body of research linking man-made emissions to warming.

In 2010, for the first time in 15 years, more bank branches closed than opened across the United States. An analysis of government data shows, however, that even as banks shut branches in poorer areas, they continued to expand in wealthier ones, despite decades of government regulations requiring financial institutions to meet the credit needs of poor and middle-class neighborhoods.

Harrowing details have emerged in recent news reports of alleged forced abortions in China’s impoverished Guangxi province. Earlier this month as many as 61 pregnant women were injected with an abortive drug after being dragged to local hospitals, according to media accounts. Human rights activists say actions allegedly carried out by family planning officials there are unlikely to be isolated. Along with forced sterilization and other coercive methods of birth control, forced abortion continues to be practiced occasionally by officials in remote parts of China despite its having been banned by the central government in Beijing.

George W. Bush is steadily and surely being rehabilitated and now the question is how much gratitude we owe him.

Sarah Palin can move the public discourse with a single tweet, promoting a worldview consisting of unreflective, nationalistic soundbites.

Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Fox are dominating the national conversation, feeding a steady stream of propaganda packaged as moral platitudes to tens of millions of true believers.

In the face of overwhelming evidence, climate deniers are choking the life out of the environmental movement and willfully condemning humanity to a calamitous future.

From ACORN to Van Jones, liberal scalps are being taken with impunity.

Feminism is being redefined and repossessed by anti-feminists.

Women are facing an all-out assault on choice.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy is being co-opted by a radio jock.

Schoolbooks are being rewritten to reflect the radical right’s anti-science views.

The rich-poor divide grows by the minute and teachers and nurses struggle to get by while bankers get massive bonuses.

We mark the end of a war based on lies with congratulations to all, and we escalate another war with scarce resources that could save countless lives.

An oil spill that should have been a historic inflection point gets excised from public awareness by our own government and disappears down the memory hole (until the next disaster).

Guns abound and the far right’s interpretation of the second amendment (the only one that seems to matter) is now inviolate.

Bigotry and discrimination against immigrants, against Muslims, against gays and lesbians is mainstream and rampant.

The frightening unconstitutional excesses of the Bush administration have been enshrined and reinforced by a Democratic White House, ensuring that they will become precedent and practice.

Girls and women across the planet continue to get beaten, raped, ravaged, mutilated, and murdered while sports games induce a more passionate response.

Kay at Feministe expands on the steady infringement of women’s reproductive rights:

Yesterday the Center for Reproductive Rights released a report that gave a deeply depressing rundown of all the ways states have worked to restrict reproductive rights this year. Reading the whole report is worthwhile, but here are the highlights.

There are some major trends in states this last year:

Ultrasound requirements or restricting doctors to read state-mandated language: It seems requiring ultrasounds before women can obtain an abortion are the hot new thing in the states, even though requiring an ultrasound seems to have no effect on a woman’s decision have an abortion.

State Stupaks–a.k.a. exchange bans: The Affordable Care Act, which was passed by Congress earlier this year contained a compromise on abortion coverage known as the Nelson Amendment. That amendment allows states to enact their own bans on abortion coverage in private insurance plans sold through state-based exchanges. As of the writing of the CRR report, five states–Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee–have enacted bans and two other states, Florida and Oklahoma, have passed bans that were vetoed by the governor.

Personhood and parental notification ballot initiatives: I already wrote about Alaska’s parental notification ballot initiative that was passed by voters last week, but Colorado and Mississippi are both going to be voting on initiatives that would define life as beginning at conception. Colorado will have this initiative on the ballot this fall–possibly aiding in turnout for Republican candidates–and Mississippi will vote on it in 2011. Defining life as beginning at contraception is problematic. The proposed initiative is designed to be a direct challenge to Roe vs. Wade thus defining abortion as murder and miscarriages as involuntary manslaughter. It would also likely outlaw most forms of contraception. Also because changing the definition of “person” would literally affect thousands of laws.

The CRR also has a rundown of what happened in several states this year…

The basic disposition of the anti-choice movement is that women and their doctors, left to their own devices, are natural born baby killers. Government is the enemy, except when it involves curtailing women’s rights.

Any hope that Democratic rule would advance the cause of women has been dashed — and now it’s a daily struggle to avoid getting Stupaked, not to mention holding on to some shred of a definition of feminism:

Several years ago, when antiabortion protesters realized that screaming “Murderer!” at women wasn’t winning hearts and minds, they launched more palatable campaigns claiming that abortion hurts women — their new protest signs read “Women Deserve Better.” (Not surprisingly, this message is much more effective than spitting invective at emotionally vulnerable women.)

When members of the conservative Independent Women’s Forum argue against efforts to address pay inequity, they say the salary gap is a result of women’s informed choices — motherhood, for example — and that claims of discrimination turn women into victims. Conservatives have realized that women respond to seemingly feminist arguments.

But, of course, Palin isn’t a feminist — not in the slightest. What she calls “the emerging conservative feminist identity” isn’t the product of a political movement or a fight for social justice.

It isn’t a structural analysis of patriarchal norms, power dynamics or systemic inequities. It’s an empty rallying call to women who are disdainful of or apathetic to women’s rights, who want to make abortion and emergency contraception illegal, who would cut funding to the Violence Against Women Act and who fight same-sex marriage rights. As Kate Harding wrote on Jezebel.com: “What comes next? ‘Phyllis Schlafly feminism?’ ‘Patriarchal feminism?’ ‘He-Man Woman Hater Feminism?’ ”

Given that so-called conservative feminists don’t support women’s rights, how can they paint their movement as pro-woman? Why are they not being laughed out of the room?

It’s because people who would have been “laughed out of the room” are now controlling our public discourse.